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THE NEW YORKER, MAY 30, 2016
own computer screen. In order to pre-
serve the anonymity of accounts, only a
few employees knew the identity behind
any account number.
But, like Edward Snowden, with
whom he claims a strong a nity, Fal-
ciani was a systems guy. His technical
expertise allowed him to outmaneuver
the bank's security software. In Geneva, he
was working on a new customer-relations
management system. One day, as he har-
vested data from the bank's internal net-
work, he says, he stumbled upon infor-
mation to which he should not have had
access: not just the names and account
numbers of customers but also the con-
fidential notes that H.S.B.C. bankers
maintained about their meetings with
clients. "I'd never heard about this sort
of flaw in the computer system," Falciani
later told the investigators.The data were
being updated in real time---it seemed
that he had stumbled into a wormhole
that held the bank's deepest secrets. He
even came across the details of his own
account with the bank. At this point, an-
other computer technician might have
hastened to inform his superiors about
the vulnerability. Falciani did not.
Nobody knows exactly how Falciani
purloined such a staggering volume of
sensitive data. Alexandre Zeller, who at
the time was the head of H.S.B.C.'s Swiss
operations, has spoken of the theft as if
it were a magic trick. In a deposition pro-
vided to French investigators, Thibaut
Lestrade, a technician with the French tax
administration, praised Falciani's wiz-
ardry: "It wouldn't have been enough to
just press a button and copy a whole
grouping of data. There were data that
came from several di erent systems
which, I suspect, were not made to be
connected to one another." A confiden-
tial investigative file compiled by Swiss
authorities notes that Falciani has "a cer-
tain talent for computing" and describes
him as "an autodidact" who is "passion-
ate about the exploration of data and the
establishment of links within them."
When I asked Falciani how he had
avoided triggering digital alarms, he ex-
plained that he had help from a shad-
owy league of like-minded profession-
als. "We started to work out a strategy,"
he said.
"Who is 'we'?" I asked.
"The Network," he replied.
"How many people are in the Network?"
He smiled cryptically. "I don't want
to give too much detail."
According to Falciani, the Network
was a loose confederation of "anti-tax-
evasion crusaders," consisting of law-
enforcement o cers, lawyers, and spies.
He told me that the Network not only
helped him to steal the data; it facili-
tated his escape to France. H.S.B.C.,
which conducted an internal investiga-
tion after Falciani became a fugitive,
maintains that his story about the Net-
work is a ruse, and that he had only one
co-conspirator: a thirty-four-year-old
Lebanese woman named Georgina
Mikhael, who had become a technical
administrator at H.S.B.C. in Septem-
ber, . Mikhael, who has since re-
turned to Beirut, has a throaty voice,
large dark eyes, and caramel-colored hair.
She and Falciani worked in adjacent
o ces, and they became close. They
would leave the building to get co ee
or to exercise at the gym. Mikhael knew
that Falciani was married, but she sensed
that he was unhappy in his marriage,
and he looked at her, she later said, as if
he could "devour me with his eyes." Be-
fore long, they had embarked on an a air.
T Nice, Éric de
Montgolfier, discovered that the files
on Falciani's hard drive were encrypted---
an unintelligible compost of names, na-
tionalities, account numbers, and deposit
amounts. French authorities established
a task force to decode the information,
calling it Operation Chocolate. ("A dumb
name," a French o cial acknowledged.
"But we weren't going to call it Opera-
tion H.S.B.C.") In February, , twenty
specialists assembled at a hotel in Nice
and set to work, in close consultation
with Falciani, who provided passwords
to decrypt the information and advice
on how to organize it. By the end of the
summer, they had extracted a list of a
hundred thousand names that were con-
nected to H.S.B.C. accounts.Éric Woerth,
the French budget minister at the time,
announced that the French government
had recovered the names of three thou-
sand taxpayers who held undeclared ac-
counts in Switzerland, remarking, "This
is the first time we have this kind of in-
formation: accurate, with names, account
numbers, and amounts on deposit. This
is exceptional."
Swiss o cials threatened to halt a se-
ries of unrelated intergovernmental ini-
tiatives if the French refused to return
the data.The Swiss newspaper Le Temps
characterized the clash over Falciani's
files as "a diplomatic earthquake." One
Swiss justice o cial sent Montgolfier an
intemperate letter saying that Falciani
had not merely damaged the bank; he
had attacked the Swiss state. "It was ex-
traordinary," Montgolfier said. "To harm
H.S.B.C. was to harm Switzerland."
The agitation of the Swiss should not
have been surprising. By the time Fal-
ciani handed the H.S.B.C. data to the
French, the Swiss tradition of financial
REALISM
God said, your name is mud
and the thing about mud is you
got to throw it down
repeatedly
to remove the air
and sometimes cut it
and rejoin it with another part.
If stars are made of dust,
it's not the same stu ,
God said;
you can't make a hut out of it,
only heaven,
and when I said dust to dust,
that's not what I meant.
Beth Bachmann